Meet the CultureBrew.Art Team
Valerie is the founding Artistic Producer of Visceral Visions, and an award-winning theatre artist who performs, writes, directs, dramaturges, and produces. The founder and creative visionary of CultureBrew.Art, Valerie is an acknowledged leader on issues of diversity and decolonization in the Canadian arts sector. Her first producing credit was the Dora-nominated premiere of The Yoko Ono Project, written by Jean Yoon; since making Vancouver her home, she has developed and/or produced the premieres of four productions, including Marie Clements’ Aboriginal blues-rock multimedia musical, The Road Forward. A recipient of the Enbridge playRites Award for Emerging Canadian Playwright, Gordon Armstrong Playwrights Rent Award, and John Moffat + Larry Lillo Prize, she has been artist-in-residence with National Arts Centre and Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, associate artist with Urban Ink Productions, and guest artist with Canada’s National Voice Intensive as well as Primary Colours/couleurs primaire’s 2018 Banff residency. She is a member of Canadian Actors’ Equity, UBCP/ACTRA, Playwrights Guild of Canada, and Banff’s Cultural Leadership 2018-19 cohort, and was honoured with the 2019 UBCP/ACTRA International Women’s Day Award in recognition of her “outstanding contributions to the Union, the industry, and causes of social justice”.
Anju is an active, multi-disciplinary artist who has worked in the non-profit and arts sector for over 15 years. Alongside her passion for the arts, Anju is excited about the ways in which she can apply technology in her work in arts and the non-profit sector. Anju's degree in Philosophy from Simon Fraser University trained her for critical and analytic thinking, as well as a love for problem solving. Following her studies, her training was nicely rounded out by her experience working in arts and non-profit organizations where she developed values that prioritize people, relationships, and more equitable practices. Anju brings to CultureBrew.Art a breadth of skills including experience from the tech sector, non-profit management, human resources training, and a strong history of operations experience. As an artist and musician, Anju’s contributions and interests cross several artistic disciplines, an important element of CultureBrew.Art, and she brings extensive experience creating, producing, and showing artistic work.
Odessa is a citizen of the Kluane First Nation in Yukon and now lives in the unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Odessa holds a BFA in Theatre from the University of British Columbia, as well as certificates in Indigenous filmmaking and cinematography from Capilano University. She has been pursuing her own vision of storytelling through documentary and narrative filmmaking as well as acting for both the stage and screen. Odessa’s short films (Cedar Tree of Life, Alive and Well, Marguerite, People of the River) have been screened all over the world in film festivals and galleries as well as broadcast on television nationally.
Born, raised and based on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Musqueam, Squamish and Tseil-Waututh, C.E. Gatchalian is a queer Filipinx diasporic author, theatre maker, producer, consultant and teacher. The author of six books and co-editor of two anthologies, he was the 2013 recipient of the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, awarded annually by The Writers’ Trust of Canada to an outstanding emerging LGBTQI+ writer. He is also a three-time Lambda Literary Award finalist and the recipient of two Jessie Richardson Awards for his work as a theatre artist and producer. He has been Playwright-in-Residence at the Firehall Arts Centre and the Vancouver Playhouse, Artist-in-Residence at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Education, and Writer-in-Residence at Historic Joy Kogawa House (Vancouver) and Berton House (Dawson City, YT). Formerly Artistic Producer of the frank theatre company, Vancouver’s professional queer theatre company, his plays have been produced locally, nationally and internationally. His memoir, Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty and the Making of a Brown Queer Man, was published in Spring 2019 by Arsenal Pulp Press.
Diana Kamau (she/her) is Kenyan born and raised around the African continent who currently resides on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded land of the Musqueam people. She is an undergraduate student in her final year in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia double majoring in English Literature and Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice Studies. Her interests include African Studies, Black feminism, Anti-Oppression work, and Afro-diasporic poetics. She is on the editorial team of decomp journal, a literary and multimedia magazine grounded in social justice that is committed to curating art from marginalized communities.
Alysha Dakha (she/her) is a second-generation daughter of settlers from Punjab, India, born and raised on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish, Kwikwetlem, and Tseil-Waututh nations. She is an undergraduate student in her final year at the University of British Columbia, majoring in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice. Alysha is an aspiring lawyer interested in feminist legal studies and using the law as a tool for social change. She is a volunteer with West Coast LEAF as a youth workshop facilitator and recently spoke as a panelist at their 2020 AGM, discussing critical, feminist, and trauma-informed approaches to public legal education and information. Alysha’s current research focuses on how technology can be used to decolonize education and transform teaching and learning spaces. Other areas of interest include critical race theory, surveillance technology, and experiences within the Punjabi-Sikh diaspora. In her free time, Alysha enjoys reading, cooking, and playing basketball with her little brother.